Subversively playing with perception
CAMBRIDGE -- "Flux Clock (Distance traveled in mm)," a timepiece that the artist Per Kirkeby designed around 1969, seems normal enough until you look closely and discover that the usual numbers have been replaced by a sequence from one to 17. Absurdly, it measures not hours and minutes but its own circumference in centimeters and millimeters. Which may prompt you to think about how arbitrary are the ways we ordinarily quantify our experiences.
Kirkeby's clock is one of many similarly disconcerting and subversive objects included in "Multiple Strategies: Beuys, Maciunas, Fluxus" at Harvard University's Busch-Reisinger Museum.
Organized by Jacob Proctor , an assistant curator of prints at the museum, the exhibition sets up an illuminating comparison between the messianic German sculptor, performance artist, and conceptualist Joseph Beuys and Fluxus , the loose, international organization of conceptual tricksters whose informal ringleader was Lithuanian-born American artist George Maciunas .
The show is ostensibly about how Beuys, Maciunas, and various Fluxus artists used multiples in the 1960s and '70s to democratize art and foment cultural revolution. Multiples are three-dimensional objects or assemblages designed to be reproduced like prints and sold for much less than one-of-a-kind artworks. Today the multiple is just another tool in the art marketing shed, but back then it seemed to some a way to put avant-garde ideas into broader circulation than the gallery and museum system allowed.
Few of the exhibition's nearly 200 mostly small works are visually wonderful. (All come from the permanent collections of the Busch-Reisinger and Harvard's Fogg Art Museum.) Variously enigmatic, funny, and tedious, the multiples by Beuys and the Fluxus artists were designed to be intellectually provocative rather than aesthetically pleasing. Nevertheless, as a study of a certain phase of avant-garde history, the exhibition is fascinating.
At first it may seem that the works of Beuys and Fluxus are more alike than different. Beuys's creations often look like products you could buy in a hardware store, while many Fluxus multiples resemble toy-store novelties. (Most of the Fluxus multiples were assembled and distributed by Maciunas, which is why they often look similar even when attributed to different artists.)
But after some time spent looking, one starts to see big differences in how Fluxus artists and Beuys relate to their audiences: While the Fluxus art arouses skepticism about all norms, Beuys's tries to inspire belief in his utopian vision.
Fluxus works are insouciantly playful and deceptively humble. A small black plastic box by Yoko Ono (the most famous of all Fluxus artists) has "A Box of Smile" printed on its lid and a mirror inside to reflect the viewer's amused surprise. Maciunas's "Burglary Fluxkit" is a plastic box containing a variety of old keys. "Excreta Fluxorum," also by Maciunas, is a transparent plastic box with lumps of brown stuff in each of its compartments identified in a wall label as animal droppings. And Ay-O's "Finger Boxes" invite viewers to stick their fingers into holes and discover soft interiors of foam or feathers.
Many Fluxus works provide instructions for games or do-it-yourself performances. George Brecht's "Bead Puzzle" has seven wooden beads on a string and instructions printed on a card that says, "Cut cord so that beads do not separate. Find another Solution. Repeat, beyond the farthest solution."
You don't have to actually play any of these games or follow their instructions. They're like Zen koans or philosophical thought experiments, which are designed to lead you to be suspicious of normally socialized states of consciousness.
Meanwhile, Beuys issued sets of wooden boxes for people to keep their thoughts in and bottles of water accompanied by instructions to drink the contents and throw the tops as far away as possible. As Fluxus artists often did, he played with puns. "The Silence" consists of the five reels of Ingmar Bergman's film "The Silence" that he had galvanized and, in effect, silenced.
Generally, however, Beuys's works function as didactic tokens of a larger spiritual and sociopolitical program. One set of multiples consists of generic products from East German stores: household implements, packaged food, drugs. On each he scrawled "1 Wirtschaftswerte" -- or, one unit of economic value. This is a lesson about relations between different kinds of values -- utilitarian value, monetary value, artistic value -- but for a viewer who is not conversant with Beuys's whole political agenda, it remains a relatively opaque gesture.
Beuys called his art social sculpture. Through performances, lectures, the distribution of multiples, and other activities, he hoped to generate a more democratic world in which anyone and everyone could be a creative participant rather than a pawn in the capitalist system.
Unlike Fluxus art, which gets into your head and messes around with your mental furniture to mind-expanding effect, Beuys's work implicitly asks viewers to believe in him and follow his charismatic leadership. One of his most provocative multiples is a seemingly ordinary white enameled metal bowl. A wall label explains that it stands for the bowl he used to wash the feet of audience members in a notorious performance he did in 1971. What it means is hard to say. Perhaps he was enacting a fantasy of the artist as a Christ-like hero, or maybe he was mocking the idea. In any case, the bowl, like many of his works, is a kind of sacred relic -- a test of faith.
Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com. 